Valid Coverage Oriented Item Perspective Recommendation

Abstract

Today, mainstream recommendation systems have achieved remarkable success in recommending items that align with user interests. However, limited attention has been paid to the perspective of item providers. Content providers often desire that all their offerings, including unpopular or cold items, are displayed and appreciated by users. To tackle the challenges of unfair exhibition and limited item acceptance coverage, we introduce a novel recommendation perspective that enables items to “select” their most relevant users. We further introduce ItemRec, a straightforward plug-and-play approach that leverages mutual scores calculated by any model. The goal is to maximize the recommendation and acceptance of items by users. Through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate that ItemRec can enhance valid coverage by up to 38.5% while maintaining comparable or superior recommendation quality. This improvement comes with only a minor increase in model inference time, ranging from 1.5% to 5%. Furthermore, when compared to thirteen state-of-the-art recommendation methods across accuracy, fairness, and diversity, ItemRec exhibits significant advantages as well. Specifically, ItemRec achieves an optimal balance between precision and valid coverage, showcasing an efficiency gain ranging from 1.8 to 45 times compared to other fairness-oriented methodologies.